Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Read Free Book Online Page A

have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than in brutish, exterior ways: turning it off, leaving the theater, pausing the disc, stuffing in a bookmark, underlining a phrase. But for those television programs, films, and novels febrile with self-consciousness, entertainment pretends it is unaware of me, and I allow it to.
    Playing video games is not quite like this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of popular entertainment. On top of that, many require a marathon runner’s stamina: Certain console games can take as many as forty hours to complete, and, unlike books, you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass-transit dead time. (Rarely has wide-ranging familiarity with a medium so transparently privileged the un-and underemployed.) Even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game’s narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art.
    Yes, as difficult as it sometimes is to believe, games have authors, however diminutive an aura he or she (or, frequently, they) might exude. What often strikes me whenever I am playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering authorial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of games, I also appreciate theremindful crack of the narrative whip—to seek entertainment is to seek that whip—and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive, appealingly dyadic form of entertainment. A video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions—as in, say,
World of Warcraft
, which is less a video game than a digital board game, and which game I very much dislike—would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship I do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. I
want
to be told a story—albeit one I happen to be part of and can affect, even if in small ways. If I wanted to
tell
a story, I would not be playing video games.
    A noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. Games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only “narrative” is what is anecdotally generated during play.
(Tetris
would be the best example of this sort of game.) My suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. I share that frustration. I also love being the agent of chaos in the video-game world. What I want from games—a control as certain and seamless as the means by which I am being controlled—may be impossible, and I am back to where I began. Reload.
    The purpose story serves in video games is complicated, then. Less complicated is how many gamers view story. For many gamers (and, by all evidence, game designers), story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more
explanation
there is, the thought appears to go, the more
story
has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise high creativeachievement of any number of games. Frequently in work with any degree of genre loyalty—this would include the vast majority of video games—the more explicit the story becomes, the more silly it will suddenly seem. (Let us call this the Midi-chlorian Error.) The best science fiction is usually densely realistic in quotidian